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In March 2005, NSRC donated a couple of routers, a switch, and some wireless Access Points for the first incarnation of the RUB network. Steve Huter has been working some with the main engineer doing the network design, deploy, etc. for the university network. In close collaboration with his good friend, Gaurab Upadhaya, who is part of this planning group, NSRC collaborated with SANOG (www.sanog.org) to organize and teach in a couple of the first tech workshops held in Bhutan for local networkers, including some participation from the education sector.
http://ws.edu.isoc.org/workshops/2005/pre-SANOG-VI/
http://ws.edu.isoc.org/workshops/2005/SANOG-VI/
Steve Huter also paid a visited to Bhutan in November and the situation there is relatively simple. There had been a number of colleges spread throughout the country and a few years ago they were assimilated into the new Royal University of Bhutan (RUB). The university is building a RUBWAN, a fiber network linking all the constituent colleges. There is also a fiber link to India from Bhutan, so they are relatively quite advanced. The hub of the network will be in a new Vice Chancellor's building in Thimphu, the capital, which is the planning stage.
RUB is the only university in Bhutan, and Jichen Thinley at Druknet has been helping them. Jichen and Guraib work together for many things, amongst other being SANOG, as steve Huter pointed out earlier. Again, Guraib would have to ask if there's been any major change from the last time i was there.
As for fiber, Bhutan Telecom is also in the same state as Nepal Telecom - they can only connect to BSNL on the indian side and cannot utilize the fiber that was laid by the Indian electric utility deep inside Bhtuan.
Maldives
We found two hosts in Maldives, (the traceroute results showed that the second last hop was through Itlay). The site has been added to the PingER Guthrie database. Later on we came to know by Guarab that at the start of 2007 the Maldives were connected through the SMW4 fibre as a result of collaboration between Dhiraagu and Telecom Italia Sparkle. There is an interesting report on Maldives Internet Connectivity at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/cs/maldives/material/CS_MDV_part3.pdf
Here is a press release from Telecom Italia Sparkle http://www.telecomitaliasparkle.com/press_info/press_info_index/event17.htm
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